Letter: Ukraine - historical and factual errors need correcting

* Ukrainian support for the invading German army in 1941 was largely attributable to the deaths of millions of Ukrainians who had previously been killed or had died of starvation in Ukraine in famines entirely attributable to the Russian dictator, Josef Stalin.

* Following the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, 92 per cent of Ukrainians opted for independence in a 1991 referendum and opted not to join Russia and the successor state to the USSR, the Confederation of Independent States (CIS). Nothing was said or done at that time to suggest that decision of the Ukrainian people was illegitimate.

* In 2004 the pro-Russian president of the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovitch, was ejected following a vote in the Ukrainian Parliament and widespread popular protests against his regime.

* That was scarcely a ‘mob led coup’ and, in any event, did not happen in 2014. What did happen in 2014 was the illegal and unprovoked Russian invasion of Crimea (until then part of Ukraine) and parts of the Ukrainian provinces of Donbas and Luhansk.

* Whatever faults can be attributed to the government of Ukraine in recent years, they cannot justify the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, the shelling and bombing of the civilian population, hospitals and childrens’ bomb shelters (all of which have been widely reported over the last month), all of which are crimes against international law.

* Unfortunately, this all goes to show that ‘top columnists’ such as Peter Hitchens writing in ‘one of the country’s national newspapers don’t make good historians and don’t always get their facts right – assuming they are correctly quoted by Mr Horne.The truth needs to be respected and understood rather than used to dress up a rhetorical argument about this country’s past involvement in Iraq and Serbia. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that involvement, it cannot justify Russian infringements of international law in Ukraine today.

Edward Coulson

Bradley